Two complementary exhibitions are currently showing at the Bluecoat in Liverpool and both explore nostalgia in film through the life and works of actor Anna May Wong. Always elegant and visually articulate, Wong was considered the first Chinese-American film star, but throughout her career (ca.1919 -to the 1960s) she had to navigate the mechanisms of mainstream culture that wanted to racialize her work as an actor, and refused her leading roles.
Just over 100 years after Wong began her career, Michelle Williams Gamaker and Dahong Hongxuan Wang revisit the actor’s professional journey, exploring what it means for diverse artists’ work in terms of gender and heritage. Both artists expose cinema as a fiction machine – flat pack sets of imaginary houses and streets, monuments and natural environments, stereotypical ideas about who the heroes are, all matched to ego and socio-political decisions.
Williams Gamaker’s Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass (2023) is a gallery full of original ephemera, props and a filmic piece called Thieves looping on the far wall. The exhibition room encompasses the artist’s exploration of European (mis)translations, or embellished retellings of ‘oriental’ folk tales such as ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’. The work exposes the influence the colonialist mindset had upon popular media; racist assumptions and inaccuracies were instrumentalized to titillate audiences in the form of what Williams Gamemaker describes as ‘historical fantasy film’.
Projected onto the far wall of Gallery One, is Williams Gamaker’s own ‘historical fantasy’ film which takes inspiration from two films of the same name: The Thief of Bagdad. The first iteration was a black and white silent adventure film produced in USA in 1924 featuring Europeans as Arabs and Anna May Wong as a Mongol slave. The second is a 1940s Technicolor affair that casts Europeans as Arabs and Sabu (Dastagir), an Indian born actor, as a young Arab servant. In Williams Gamaker’s own fantasy The Thief of Bagdad rehash, the slave and the servant character meet on set and conspire to overcome the injustice of having their humanity reduced by the politics of stereotyping. Part of this plan weaponizes the mis-epresentation of the Hindu Goddess Kali – the Destroyer of evil and protector of the innocent, enacting the desire for change – as a violent force for reparative justice.
All the pieces of the exhibition, including the film, posters, set designs and costumes, are produced in collaboration between Williams Gamaker, Clare Charnley, Tara White, Puer Deorum, Yuna Goda and Krishna Istha and Dahong Hongxuan Wang.
The Bang Straws (2021), Williams Gamaker’s moving-image piece showing upstairs in the second floor gallery has a striking paced intensity. Again, Wong and her experiences are the focus and the piece takes as its inspiration the scandalous case of her being denied the lead role in the film The Good Earth (1937) in favour of a German-born actress, Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar for her performance. The film was about Chinese farmers. Rainer and her Jewish co-star were required to wear ‘yellow-face’ make-up. The artist Dahong Hongxuan Wang deftly plays a contemporary version of Wong and Williams Gamaker’s production allows the piece to breathe beautifully.
Dahong Hongxuan Wang’s own work in the next gallery, Role Model (2023), is a filmic documentary-style piece showing the antithesis of the ‘exotic atmosphere’ that continuously influenced the roles Anna May Wong was offered. Wang uses her ‘role model and inspiration’ to show the reality of a contemporary artistic life using Wong’s own documentary, when she travelled to China for the first time, as a framework.
In Role Model we see Wang’s navigation of the disapproval of her profession by elders, society’s negative connotations of the ‘painted lady’, a China that is grand, but windswept and cold, and a huddle of neighbourhood children, gathered together perhaps as substitutes for her own. Exploring the act of staying one step ahead of unrealistic and therefore unsatisfactory depictions of real people and places shows how hard the fight for the retention of women’s artistic soul can be.
Those shown battles are alleviated by the last shots of the creative ensemble eating together, shots that also gently remind us that this piece is also a construct, albeit more positive. The difficulties and carefulness of creating are shown to be important, both to the pleasure we experience when working as artists, and the use we make of our practice in relationships with other ‘pre-arranged’ constructs, such as domestic and public spaces.
Both exhibitions explore the conventions of film narratives by disrupting original fictional codes and rerouting their cause and effect through diversity. The artists complicate notions of how racialized peoples, who have an existence outside of what film or creative production shows of them, manage to find place creatively.
There are political, moral and ethical questions raised about the signifiers and assumptions the artists expose in popular nostalgic entertainment. What was considered wholesome reveals itself to be narrowed and diversity objectified. Together these works, sometimes with much beauty, show how exclusionary processes of othering and its histories can be reflected back through contemporary art.
Michelle Williams Gamaker: Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass & Dahong Hongxuan Wang: Role Model, the Bluecoat 03 May – 30 June 2024.
Chantal Oakes is a writer and researcher based in Preston
This review is supported by the Bluecoat
Published 25.06.2024 by Natalie Hughes in Reviews
913 words